You know how it is: You sign up for an email newsletter, and then the second it first appears in your inbox you delete it. So if you’re an interior designer, how do you get people to sign up for your email list, and how do you keep them interested in it once you do? The answer is email funnels, a system that automates your emails and keeps you engaged with your audience. Email lists are essential to reaching out to potential clients, and on this week’s Wingnut Social Podcast, Darla and Natalie go deep on funnels.

Alycia Wicker is this week’s guest, and though the bio she sent in was only a single sentence long, stating that she’s a business coach for interior designers, Alycia is much more than that. She runs an entertaining email newsletter, she produces amazing marketing guides for interior designers, and her diction is somewhere just north of sailor.

Resources & People Mentioned

Why email matters to your interior design business

Getting your work in front of potential clients’ eyes is never easy. As Alycia notes, everyone has had difficulties with Facebook’s algorithm ignoring their posts. The “magical unicorn” of Facebook is dead, and if you want to really engage with your audience you need to speak to them directly. But that’s not the only reason email is so important for interior designers.

It’s vital that you build and maintain a great email list because you are then not dependent upon other platforms, like Facebook, to bring traffic to you. You own it, you talk directly to the people who want to hear from you. And you get to drive traffic to your own website, which has enormous benefits in the long run.

How to create an email list without being annoying

You can put a “subscribe for updates” link wherever you like, but unless people really love you, they’re not going to invite you into their inbox. But what you can do is show readers that you are able to solve a problem they have. So maybe that’s putting up a blog post that shows how to properly do a coffee table, then you have a link to your newsletter so they can get more helpful advice like that.

Essentially, when we’re talking about getting people to sign up to your email list, we’re talking about lead magnets. As Alycia says, you should have more than one lead magnet if you want to build your list quickly. Your first goal for an email list is 1,000 subscribers, and to do that you should be looking at what content you already have, and adding lead magnets to that content to get people onto your email list. And from there, you create email funnels to automate communication with potential clients, which is how you turn leads into clients.

Connect With Darla & Wingnut Social

Darla Powell is the Principal Designer of Darla Powell Interiors in Miami Florida and is also the Head Wingnut at Wingnut Social. Darla discovered very quickly that her love for interior design was only rivaled by that of her love for the branding, blogging and social media marketing which she found by digging in deep when launching her own design firm.